Captain Willard is assigned an important mission that
requires him to venture back into Vietnam and all the way to Cambodia: he is to
find and “exterminate with extreme prejudice” a Special Forces Commander who
has turned renegade, has been charged by the army with murder, and has been
deemed completely insane. Sailing to Cambodia with a small force on a patrol
boat, the more that Willard learns about his target, the more he begins to
question his mission.
I’m still not completely up to speed with what I just
watched, but I can say that Apocalypse
Now is a most brutal and nightmarishly truthful conveyance of what real
horror is. One does not need killers with hockey masks or chainsaws that never
seem to run out of juice, all one needs is to witness the hardships and complete
horrific brutality of war and it’s enough to make the insides churn, the heart
pump faster, and the hands to fly to the face. Coppola’s movie is more than
just an iconic and apocalyptic war movie; it is a forceful push into the
fragility of the human mind as well as a philosophical search for an answer to
the mysteries of madness, evil, and judgement.
Captain Willard is assigned an
important mission that requires him to venture back into Vietnam and all the
way to Cambodia: he is to find and “exterminate with extreme prejudice” a
Special Forces Commander who has turned renegade, has been charged by the army
with murder, and has been deemed completely insane. Sailing to Cambodia with a
small force on a patrol boat, the more that Willard learns about his target,
the more he begins to question his mission.
A montage of an array of textual
sources including Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart
of Darkness, Homer’s The Odyssey,
and Michael Herr’s book of Vietnam reportage Dispatches, Apocalypse Now
is both an action epic and a journey of self-discovery as well as a brutal and
horrifyingly vivid portrayal of the Vietnam War. The constant stream of
gunfire, screams, miasmas of coloured smokes, blood, and death are absolutely
brutal and often hard to watch.
The screenplay, written by Coppola and John
Milius, is phenomenal: opening with a devastating montage of fires, smoke, and
explosions set against the Door’s song The
End. From that first reel, the entire film is three hours of “Asian orange
sunsets through the scrubs”, philosophical monologues, and dazed and hypnotic
close-ups, and even some dark comedy, which manifests itself in the form of
Robert Duvall’s character: the man behind iconic scenes such as “I love the
smell of napalm in the morning” and the “death from above” where the
helicopters attack set against the music of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.
The film is not only gargantuan and
apocalyptic in cinematic proportions: both in its visual horror and action and
its philosophical and mind-blowing narration and monologues, not to mention its
3-hour duration, but also behind the scenes. The project was so large and
throughout its creation, numerous dramas occurred which threatened its
completion, not to mention sudden changes and reworking that happened more than
halfway through. Poor Martin Sheen suffered a near-fatal heart attack on
location and dear Marlon Brando showed up overweight and unprepared, forcing
another rethink as to how to complete the movie without killing anyone.
Starring Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Albert Hall, Frederic
Forrest, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper and Harrison Ford, Apocalypse Now is an amazing piece of
work, absolutely groundbreaking, but unfortunately one that I just could not
make heads or tails of. Filled with violence, warfare, gunfire, explosions,
fire, torture, philosophy, and the odd bit of dark comedy, it’s a movie that
will definitely stay with you and its genius and cinematic magnitude cannot be
denied, even if you don’t grip what’s going on.
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